Surfing Projects

Old boards and old fins

This story starts with a borrowed Gordon and Smith "Midget Farrelly Stringerless" that I took for a spin courtesy of Sam at Taco Surf, and a fin box that had been ripped from a board and washed ashore in the cove at Tourmaline with the fin still attached, only to be found by Steve The Kneeboarder (see "Stoked and Broke" by Cyrus Sutton and Ryan Burch).

My goals for this project are simple:

create the proverbial "one board quiver"

create the most exciting surfboard ever ridden!

Surfboard design, like many things, is a process of give and take, of exploring limits and then finding a middle ground that works best for any given set of conditions. Our shared liquid playground offers an infinite set of variables that seem to make building the perfect board an impossible task. Factors such as swell direction and storm proximity, wave height, pitch, speed, smooth or choppy surface conditions, lefts or rights, ocean floor contours, beach breaks, point breaks, reef breaks, flat faced or hollow tubes, undercurrents and rips, winds and tides all combine to determine the type of surfing and surf craft that is best for the current conditions.

And just as wave conditions depend on infiinite combinations of the above factors, board design also offers an infinite combination of rail outline, rocker, thickness, fin type and placement, rounded hull designs or concave(s), and so on, each combining to form an overall riding experience that hopefully allows the rider's skill level to shine through in whatever conditions exist at that moment in time.

Even moderately experienced surfers know that the more rocker a board has and the curvier its outline, the better it will turn but the slower it will go in a straight line. Conversely, a very flat board with a straight outline is going to travel like a missile through the water, but good luck turning it without stomping on the tail to slow it down and then really cranking one rail into the water. See Ryan Burch's experimentations with finless chunks of rectangular foam at about the 7:00 mark of this video for example.

One of our pet projects is the website iSurfedThere.com. I started this with my good buddy Glen like eight years ago(!), and we are still committed to the concept, despite all of the ups and downs we've encountered while trying to build a worldwide social network on a shoestring budget.

The core concept is pretty simple - a place to track all of the spots you've surfed.